Thanks to our friends at Spaceship for sponsoring this blog post!
Putting design at the heart of technology
What’s the difference between a great machine and a great product? Design. Not just in terms of practical function, but in terms of overall branding design. Treating your brand design as an afterthought means you’re not truly putting the customer first. In fact, branding, design, and technology should all be treated as one to bring the ultimate user experience and consistency.
Everyone loves simplicity
That may seem obvious, but in the world of technology, it can often feel like only the beginners get an easy ride. Why should more advanced technology not be simple too?
So, no matter what you’re building or creating, or who you’re making it for, everyone will thank you for making it easier — even if they already know how to do certain tasks. It’s a question of looking at processes, and even established ways of doing things, and asking if it can be done simpler. Then asking how your UX and brand design can help.
Even in the world of domain names, recurring frustrations like connecting and configuring products after purchase are commonplace. Look at how your product or customer problems can be solved through simple actions, or even automatically initiated.
Shape the design
So your technology needs to be shaped to make it easy for customers i.e. by design. This not only means looking at solving customer problems, but also creating unified, consistent design elements and systems. The overall brand needs to be created using this approach too, as a key catalyst for simplicity and usability.
Build a design framework
Making everything simple is easy in theory, but in reality we live in a multi-disciplined world, covering different expertise, processes, and teams. Vital to making everything run like clockwork is developing a ‘brand system’ framework.
The system should be developed to serve alongside, and also shape, your brand guidelines. Focusing on the creation of reusable components, patterns, and templates across your website, interfaces, dashboards, and app creates the building blocks of the entire brand presence. This approach helps:
- Bring an extra layer of consistency across absolutely everything
- Speed up production and deployment in the fast-paced tech world
- Create a unified platform bringing the website, interfaces, etc, together
- Allow for fast evolution (and revolution) in an ever-changing web industry
On a human level, it also facilitates closer collaboration across Brand, Design, Marketing, Product, and Technology teams, as solutions are found and processes are created more universally.
“Ensuring that design systems are flexible enough to accommodate rapid technological changes while maintaining visual and functional consistency is key. Bridging the gap between creative vision and technical feasibility often required innovative problem-solving and close collaboration between designers, engineers, and wider stakeholders too. This is a system for human relationships.” - Rodrigo Melo, Head of Design Innovation at Spaceship
Spotlighting the system
Efficiency and reusability
At the heart of the design system sits the philosophy of reusability, with core components, patterns, and templates designed to allow quick deployment, alongside more dynamic and open iterations.
Accessibility compliant
Going beyond mere compliance, your design system should provide accessible design patterns and components that enhance user experience without compromising usability.
Scalable and mutable
This means accommodating changes, like theming and color palette adjustments, to key components. Making them adaptable to individual product, customer, or process needs without starting from scratch.
Unified self-service
Empowering your teams and third-party providers with the tools, processes, and documentation necessary for quick minimum viable product (MVP) solutions and iterative development.
Everything should be accessible and constantly updated in libraries covering:
- Foundations: fundamental visual and structural elements like typography and pallets
- Components: stand-alone UI elements engineered to specific functions, but able to adapt
- Templates: blueprints for entire website pages and other assets ensuring a consistent presence
Creating an integrated visual brand
Underneath it all — the technology, the UX, the problem solving — it is still important to make sure your brand stands out and has an emotive impact. Being able to attract new customers is also vital, after all. But you need this brand identity to work with your overall system.
“Having a beautiful visual brand that not just reflects but emphasizes innovation was key. Being able to show, and not just tell, is a powerful thing. At the same time, having visual simplicity stays true to our overall usability goals, while actually adding to the beauty.” -Spaceship’s Head of Website Platform and Digital Marketing, Marina Zhuravlova
Visual brand principles
While innovation is indeed a powerful things, sticking to the tried and tested method of embedding brand principles still plays its part. Make sure you have these essential elements to guide the creative aspects of your branding.
Universal & timeless
Your brand must be able to speak to a wide audience regardless of gender, age, culture, or location. What is created today should be valid in the future. Avoid obvious and figurative representations and focus on the essence of the message. Escape literal and clichéd approaches.
Physical & non-physical
There are no boundaries to the imagination, so explore and merge different worlds. Go beyond the obvious and embrace true inspiration. The universe of ideas, the digital realm, and the material world are all there to spark your imagination.
Pure and simple
Sophistication comes through simplicity. Acknowledge the power of purity and focus on removing noise to reveal the true essence of things. This doesn’t mean that our style should be soulless and empty. The way we overcome complexity is inevitably through beauty.
The practical application of beauty
Of course, a vibrant color palette is important, alongside the right fonts. But they are brand basics. The true challenge lays in achieving aesthetic goals in a systematic, modular way that world within your overall design system. It’s not just about creating beautiful web pages, but beautiful and consistent experiences. This is where an illustrative approach can come in very useful.
Visual language
Like any written language, the ability to build words and sentences is only possible by the existence of an alphabet. Although it is tempting to represent more complex technology through complex compositions, aiming for simplicity and a more immediate emotional impact is always preferable.
Micro illustrations
These can be used to clearly visualize products and their functionality, while creating a balance between the literal and emotional aspects of the brand.
Pictograms
Used to give prominence and enhance the usability of specific web components, pictograms are primarily used to communicate a concept quickly and in smaller sizes. They use simple geometry to make sure that pictograms are sharp, easily recognizable, and will communicate a concept quickly.
Icons
Used to give prominence and enhance the usability of specific components across the interface, icons’ primary goal is to communicate a concept quickly and in limited space.
Bringing products and categories to life
Your products will all have different selling points or target audiences, and it’s important to guarantee they can easily be distinguished. To match a systemic approach with visual creativity, try creating brand concepts for each core product and category. These help distill products and categories down to their true essence.
For Spaceship, the concept was built around a “core” to represent the central role a domain name plays in starting online ventures — “The origin and expansion of everything”.
- Domains: “The origin and expansion of everything”
- Web Hosting: “The power that sustains it all”
- Security: “The freedom to prosper through safety”
Building the digital future together
Putting design at the heart of technology is not just about making for a better customer experience and a more consistent, compelling brand. It will help your entire business adapt quickly. This is especially important for newer ventures that need to adapt and pivot. In the case of Spaceship, it actually helps customers become part of it’s evolution.
Through initiatives like the Spaceship Roadmap, anyone can suggest, check, and vote on new features. The most popular are prioritized for development and release. So the ability to deploy a comprehensive yet adaptable design system quickly is critical to meeting customer expectations.
Ultimately, prioritizing good design is the key to delivering not just a great customer experience, but delivering a better digital business. Constantly adapting to changing needs, while maintaining brand and performance consistency.
